Critic Quotes: Insights and Wisdom from Renowned Critics (Page 2)

"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven"

Walter Benjamin, Critic

"One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening"

Walter Pater, Critic

"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like"

Walter Benjamin, Critic

"I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"Many of us spend half of our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing"

Alexander Woollcott, Critic

"Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence"

Russell Lynes, Critic

"One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well"

Louis Kronenberger, Critic

"Because what's going on now, and this applies mostly to television stations in the largest markets too, but TV stations basically are now the primary receivers of campaign spending"

Robert McChesney, Critic

"The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose"

John T. Flynn, Critic

"The pursuit of approval usually ends in disaster"

Chris Morris, Critic

"America is a land where men govern, but women rule"

John Mason Brown, Critic

"We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in discussing what are its real motives"

Paul Weyrich, Critic

"The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages"

Fredric Jameson, Critic

"Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more"

Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic

"The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy"

Clive Bell, Critic

"Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has"

Alphonse Karr, Critic

"Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art"

Lytton Strachey, Critic